Tag: fiction

And when things didn’t go quite as expected, Americans lost their shit.

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Haven’t read fiction in months.

Sharon Guskin‘s debut novel is an Amazon Best Book of February, 2016.

I don’t believe in reincarnation.

NY Times Book Review: “Sounds ludicrous. It shouldn’t work. But Guskin pulls off the silly premise with a gripping, deft and moving mystery.” 

And, swept away by this page turner.

Here’s a biscuit…

“This never would have happened in India. In India they understood that life unfolded the way it unfolded, whether you liked it or not: the cow in the road, the swerve that saves or kills you. One life ended, a new one began, maybe it was better than the last one, maybe it wasn’t. The Indians (and the Thais, and the Sri Lankans) accepted this the way they accepted the monsoons or the heat, with a resignation that was like simple good sense. Damned Americans. Americans, unschooled in the burning dung heaps and the sudden swerves, Americans couldn’t help but cling tightly to the life they were living like clutching a spindly branch that was sure to break … and when things didn’t go quite as expected, Americans lost their shit. Himself included.”

~ Sharon Guskin, The Forgetting Time: A Novel

Notes:

Read

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Beyond the First Draft

wsj: How to Read a Book – and Maybe Write One:

 Beyond the First Draft” is a collection of essays about writing. Because they are about writing, they’re also about reading. For John Casey, as I would judge for most good writers, it’s difficult to separate the two activities. One feeds into the other, and the process is repeated in reverse. No doubt there are exceptions, because there is scarcely a rule to which there aren’t, but it is rare to find a writer who wasn’t first, and for a long part of his life, a devoted and compulsive reader, though not necessarily a discriminating one.

[…] This is just what John Casey does in these essays, encouraging us to look more closely and intelligently at what we read and even at what we may be trying to write.

~ Allan Massie, in a review of John Casey’s “Beyond the First Draft”

John Casey, 75, was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and the University of Iowa. His previous novel, Spartina, won the 1989 National Book Award for fiction. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he is Professor in the English Department at the University of Virginia.  In Beyond the First Draft he offers his essential and original insights into the art of writing—and rewriting—fiction. Find his new book on Amazon here: Beyond the First Draft.